Original subtitles

I'm going to bring her out here right now.

Dolores.

While the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Was leading the charge in the South,

one California woman was fighting on the front lines

for workers' rights.

And while her name is rarely mentioned in the history books,

she may just be

the most vocal activist you've never heard of.

Come along, brothers. We are waiting for you!

Dolores Huerta helped lead a worldwide grape boycott

that forced growers to agree

to some of the country's first farmworker contracts.

Viva la cause!

Viva la huelgal.

She's the first general that I followed into war.

The workers are on the rise.

Dolores Huerta, who is an old friend of mine...

What she is, she's an insult to the farmworker.

Why are the growers and the teamsters so against her?

Because they're threatened.

We're never giving up.

Dolores is an icon.

Dolores Huerta has said

Republicans hate Latinos.

She also writes

the alternative to capitalism is democratic socialism.

She's not afraid

to speak truth to power.

She's a clown.

We thank you for all you have done

and all you still do

to promote the dignity and human rights

of America's family.

She's a civil rights hero.

She's been beaten up and she's gone to jail.

She's a very volatile individual.

We always like to say

that we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.

The FBI knew

how dangerous Dolores was.

Conservatives on the Texas Board of Education

removed the legendary farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta

from the state social studies curriculum.

I got to tell you, I never heard of this woman.

We've really got

to set the record straight.

I mean, women cannot be written out of history.

You were a young girl,

growing up in America in the '40s.

You must have had a dream.

I guess my only dream was just to be accepted.

I think that's what a lot of young children feel,

just to be accepted for what you are and that's not possible.

Tell me when you were first aware

of having a social conscience.

I think that I felt it very deeply

as a teenager and it was mostly because of the police brutality

against Mexicans and blacks,

the kids that I grew up with,

and you find out that the justice, it's not there.

The equality isn't there.

If you were coming of age in the 19505

in California in the San Joaquin Valley,

you were coming of age in a time of conformity.

Everybody was being fit into a mold,

and if you were Dolores Huerta,

there was no mold.

My mom, she grew up in the '40s,

you know, like the dances, the bebop, the big band,

the swing, you know.

She's an American girl, you know.

Back in those days, all of the Latina women

got married very young... 15,16,17 years old.

My first husband, we had a lot in common.

We were both into jazz,

but I don't think that we were ready for marriage yet.

Then my second husband, we had kind of a culture clash

because of the way that I grew up

and the way that he grew up.

My mother was a single parent, she was a businesswoman,

and like her, I worked all the time.

You know, my mother-in-law could never understand why

I didn't just stay home with the children.

And so, Dolores talks about her life as a young mother

and as a married woman

and not feeling that was quite enough,

that she needed to do more than that.

That's when she met Fred Ross.

When I met Fred Ross and he talked to me

about how people could get together

in an organization and really start changing things,

to me it was just a revelation.

LORI de LEON: Fred Ross was a community organizer

with the Community Service Organization

who developed house meetings.

You're on the ground,

identifying individuals who are willing, you know,

to do the work to make the communities better.

I still remember my first house meeting.

Fred showed us pictures of the improvements

that they had done in East Los Angeles,

like bringing in street lights and sidewalks,

bringing in health clinics.

But the one that really hooked me

was when he showed us press clippings of police

that they had sent to prison

for beating up Mexican-American kids.

And I thought, any organization that can do that,

I want to belong to that organization.

I think that my mom experienced

enough of that injustice or discrimination to where

she just could not keep it down.

She could not keep quiet.

In 1959, I became the political director

for the Community Service Organization,

and helped draft a lot of the legislation

that we ultimately got approved in Sacramento.

I was only 25 at this time, or 26 years old.

I was very young.

There were very, very few Latinos-

and I'm talking about men...

In the legislature in California in the '50s and '60s.

It was all white men,

and here you have someone

like Dolores Huerta, that was just...

People just didn't do that in those days.

We had one piece of legislation to take away the requirement

that you had to be a U.S. citizen

to get public assistance.

I took parents whose kids had served in World War II

to this one senator who was key for us to get that legislation,

sat them in his office

with the pictures of their kids in uniform.

They couldn't speak English,

Senator Kolbe couldn't speak Spanish, but I told them,

"Just stay here until he says yes,

that he'll vote on that bill."

What kind of a lobbyist is she?

Oh, she's a great lobbyist.

She's indefatigable.

She's unorthodox.

You know, Dolores will bring in hundreds of people

and they'll camp outside your office.

So when Dolores is in Sacramento,

everybody knows she's in Sacramento.

Fred Ross was always talking about

this great organizer, Cesar Chavez,

so Fred introduced us.

Cesar was very shy.

I remember one time

that he was sitting down by himself at a table

and so I rushed over and sat down

and started trying to talk to him

and he immediately got up and walked away.

Fred would always tell Cesar how he met this woman,

she's dynamite, great organizer.

He was a little bit jealous

when Fred would talk to him about her.

He was a little bit jealous about that.

I gave my report on the legislative work

that we were doing up in Sacramento.

He and Fred Ross came over and invited me

to have lunch with them

so I was very thrilled, because I thought,

"Oh my, Cesar's finally paying attention to what I'm doing."

They were having a meeting and they needed a Chicano legislator

to do some things and he was arguing why it couldn't be done.

And it was when my mother began telling him

all the reasons why he needed to get done

that Cesar took a step back and he goes,

"Now I see what Fred was talking about."

All this work that we were doing,

Cesar organizing the farmworkers in Oxnard,

my organizing farmworkers in Stockton,

was under the auspices of the Community Service Organization.

But when it came time then to make it a union,

the CS0 decided not to support us.

That's when Cesar called me to come over to his house

and he said, "We have to organize a union."

He put it this way, he said, "Unless you and I do it,

it's never going to happen."

And then he said in the next breath,

"But we will not see a national union in our lifetime

"because the growers are too rich, they're too powerful,

and they're too racist."

One of the really tragic contradictions

about the United States of America is that

it has presented itself before the world

as a beacon of independence and liberty and human rights.

Of course,

the real stain on this mythology is slavery

and with it, the potential for the enslavement of others.

This was a very real threat for all Mexicans

living in California.

After 1848,

it was a continuing threat for all of the immigrants

that came from China, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam.

Racism has been endemic to American history.

The feudal wage slavery of agribusiness

is really just an extension of the attitude

that had persisted in the country

and the irony is that none of us can live without food.

None of us can live without what's produced in our fields.

This is life,

and yet these are the worst-paid workers on the planet.

When we came here to this little, tiny town

in California called Delano,

I started working in the fields when I was 15 years old

and they were paying 90 cents per hour.

There was no cold drinking water

and the weather gets to be about 115 degrees.

If you complained about any of these conditions,

you were told to get the hell out.

There were plenty of other people

that could come and take your place.

And the women were treated worse than the men.

You had no protection.

There was a lot of mistreatment

and a lot of rape, there was a lot of...

I mean there's a lot of that went on.

My grandfather was living on a vineyard

in a house that was owned by the people who employed him.

It was sort of this sense of slavery, right?

You couldn't do anything wrong against your employer,

because if you did, were they going to kick out your family?

Where were you going to go?

You don't speak the language.

You're not even a citizen of the country yet.

They used to say

that they wanted to hire Mexicans

because we were built closer to the ground,

and that, in my opinion, was the worst part:

The humiliation of knowing that people held you in contempt.

After I had seen the miserable conditions of farmworkers

and knowing how to organize people,

having achieved these incredible successes on legislation,

I just felt that that's what I needed to do.

It was just such a calling.

I felt it so strongly that in spite of all of the negatives

that you might think, "You can't do that.

"You've got seven kids.

You're going through the middle of a divorce."

Many people thought I was making a very foolish decision.

LORI de LEON: My uncles, my aunts,

our family didn't understand why my mother

would give up everything

to work with farmworkers who have nothing.

I did pray that if I was doing the wrong thing,

I wanted a sign that I was doing the wrong thing.

Making this huge, huge decision to leave my home in Stockton,

to come to Delano, not knowing where my next meal

was going to be coming from.

I was worried about how my kids would be able to take the move

because they left all their friends behind

and we had a very comfortable home.

I left a couple of my younger children behind.

I knew that I was doing something that I wanted to do.

They had no choice.

The last thing that I did before I went to Delano,

I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival.

I always loved jazz music,

and that was one of the big sacrifices that I made

when I went to Delano because after that,

I didn't hear any music for... for years.

LORI de LEON: It was very, very sad.

We went from a home

where we were surrounded by family,

to Delano,

first and foremost because

we didn't have our mother at that point.

She was off and running.

We soon recognized that my mother

really didn't belong to us.

The reason for the existence of the union

is to try to get power for the powerless.

The farmworkers don't have any power

to solve any of their own economic and social problems.

You know, they're faced by not only economic discrimination

and social, but also racial discrimination.

This is true of the Mexican farmworkers.

It is of the black farmworker, the Arabian,

and sometimes even the poor white farmworker.

Cesar, what made you pick Dolores,

a woman, to help you form the United Farm Workers?

We had worked before together,

and she believed as I did

that this job could be done,

the workers could be organized.

She had the faith and the drive and the enthusiasm.

So those are some of the reasons.

The... the skills, a lot of knowledge,

and a lot of just willingness to sacrifice.

We divided the San Joaquin Valley.

Cesar took the southern half, I took the northern half,

and we did house meetings in all the different counties.

So we had all of these committees that we organized.

We had a thousand members and we had benefits.

We had a life insurance plan.

We had an office, we started a credit union,

the first farmworker credit union in the history

of the United States of America, where people could get loans.

We had a cooperative store.

We did services, we did immigration work,

we did their income taxes.

We had a five-year plan to have a national strike

in the Central Valley

because we wanted all of the growers to negotiate together,

but what disrupted that plan

was when the Filipino workers went out on strike.

Because there was so much violence against the Filipinos.

They locked them in their bunkhouses in the labor camps,

they turned off the light, gas, and the water.

Some of them were beaten up.

And so when these stories came back to us,

well, we thought we don't have any option.

So we joined forces on the strike

to support the Filipino workers.

♪ This land is your land ♪

♪ This land is my land ♪

♪ From California ♪

♪ To the New York island ♪

♪ From the redwood forest ♪

♪ To the Gulf Stream waters ♪

♪ I tell you ♪

♪ This land was made for you and me ♪

♪ As I went walking ♪

;Huelga, huelga!

That was an amazing thing

for me, as a young Chicano,

to suddenly come upon two people in the field

that were actually working on a social problem

that had affected my whole life.

I saw them up close and I had no problem

believing that I had to follow them.

I had to become a follower.

♪ Solidarity forever... ♪

I was not an easy follower.

I was pretty independent,

but here suddenly is Cesar

and here is Dolores.

And I devoted all of my energies, all of my waking hours

to follow them into the cause.

I too have the dream that I learned from Dolores Huerta

that farmworkers can share in the wealth

that they help to produce.

She has such a firm belief

in what she's doing

that she infects you with it.

Dolores Huerta.

Muchas gracias, compafieros y compafieras.

Then I think she looks deep within you

and she understands what you're capable of,

that you actually can do more

than what you thought was possible.

When we started to organize farmworkers,

people would say to us, "They're poor,

"they don't speak English, they're not citizens.

How are you going to possibly organize them?"

And of course the response that we had to that is,

"The power is in your body."

;Viva la cause!

;Viva la huelgal.

One of the things that was very helpful in the beginning

was that Dolores being out there

made it all right for women to be in the picket line

and so it made it all right for the husbands

to permit their wives to be in the picket line,

and their daughters, and their mothers and so forth.

We found that it's a tremendous advantage

to give women equal participation in the union

because, well, they're tremendous resources there

and they should be used.

We had women who ran the clinics.

We had women as field directors.

Women did a lot of the clerical work.

I remember hearing people say to Cesar,

"Why do you have so many women?"

and he'd say, "Because they do the work."

Whether it be Dolores Huerta,

Jessica Govea,

or Helen Chavez,

there were more women involved in the UFW

than probably every other

labor union in the United States combined.

The one place where we were lacking

was on the executive board

and for many, many years, I was the only woman on the board.

Cesar, you represent a culture

that says the woman must be protected at all costs,

yet you take Dolores right out in the picket line,

into a demonstration.

Do you ever worry about her life?

We worry, sure.

There are some situations that are very dangerous,

but she's a leader of the union

and those are the risks that have to be taken.

These were not small farmers.

This was agribusiness,

and the growers were tied into local government

and have control of local sheriffs.

So when we would go on a picket line,

the sheriffs would not hesitate to beat somebody.

The contractors or the foremen or some of the tractor workers

wouldn't hesitate to run over a striker.

I know of no grower in the Delano area

who has refused or who would refuse

to sit down and to talk with the workers on his farm.

But not with the union organization.

But they do not feel that the organizer and the agitators

represent their workers.

We had been on strike since September of 1965,

and at the beginning,

we had a lot of people that brought donations,

contributions to keep the strike going,

but as the months went on, it was tapering off.

So we knew we had to do something different

and that's when we came up with the idea

of doing the march to Sacramento.

The strikers and their supporters

is beyond question

the largest and the most significant gathering

on behalf of the farmworkers in California history.

Along the march she negotiated the Schenley contract,

which was the first contract in history

between farmworkers and the growers.

Labor history has been made here in California today,

an agreement between

the National Farm Workers Association

and the Schenley Industries Corporation.

Dolores Huerta negotiated

my grandfather's first union contract,

and it was because of Dolores's work that my grandpa was able

to get water in the workplace. Drinking water, toilets.

LORI de LEON: And her being a young Chicana,

sitting at the table facing the growers

with farmworkers who were primarily just Spanish-speaking,

some of them illiterate,

stayed with me throughout my life how individuals,

whether they can read, write, or speak English or not,

have individual power.

If the rules to settle our economic problems

are not forthcoming,

we will take economic pressures,

strike, boycott,

to force recognition and obtain collective bargaining rights.

The social and economic revolution of the farmworkers

is well underway,

and it will not be stopped until we receive equality.

If Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez

felt it was possible

to organize farmworkers

when no one believed that that was possible,

it was because

many of us during that period

were totally convinced that we could change the world.

We were persuaded

that revolutionary change was possible.

♪ Uh, with your bad self ♪

♪ Say it loud ♪

♪ I'm black and I'm proud! ♪

♪ Say it loud ♪

♪ I'm black and I'm proud! ♪

♪ Some people say we got a lot of malice ♪

♪ Some say it's a lot of nerve ♪

♪ But I say we won't quit moving until we get what we deserve ♪

This was in the '60s.

The civil rights movement was going on,

the peace movement was going on,

the feminist movement was just starting,

and the environmental movement was just starting,

and so you had this ambience all around you

that you could really change the world.

There was a lot of electricity in the air.

I mean, it was new. People were like free.

♪ Say it loud ♪

♪ I'm black and I'm proud ♪

It was electric, especially when you walked past the fields

and there was a lot of people in the fields still working

"and people were marching and say, "Vengan hermanos.

Come on, come on, Vengan, sélganse."

Unanse con HOSOUOS.

And people would actually come out of the fields.

♪ Now we demand a chance ♪

♪ To do things for ourselves ♪

It became really apparent that the racism

that touches black people is no different

than the racism that touches the other groups,

and so we were really marching for everybody.

We were marching for social change.

Oftentimes today looking back,

we think about discrete and distinct movements.

We think that the black movement was one movement,

and then the Chicano movement was over here,

and then there was the Native American movement.

But all of those movements,

and the individuals within those movements,

were connected, and we knew that one movement

would not be successful without the other.

Today we talk about the intersectionality of struggles,

but I think during that period we actually lived it.

We experienced it.

If you remain truly nonviolent,

and I'm pledging my support...

We come today to lend our moral support,

our fiscal support,

and our financial support

to the efforts of Cesar Chavez.

There was a lot of passion in all of us

for what we were doing.

I mean, we were making five dollars a week

in terms of salary, right?

That was more than just the union not having the resources.

It didn't.

It was also because there was no way you could pay people

to work seven days a week.

You know, it had to come from your heart.

I remember Dolores calling and saying,

"Well, why don't you come work for us?"

I said, "Well, how much does it pay?"

"Five dollars a week and all you can eat."

I said, "I don't think my father will appreciate that"

"having helped me get through law school

and going back to where they left."

And of course, I said yes.

And my father was angry because he thought it was regressive.

In reality, it was a most trans...

(voice breaking}: Formative period in my life.

We wish to welcome you to Delano.

You know, and I don't have to tell you this,

how thankful we are for the gifts that you have brought us.

You also know that the gifts of food and clothing

are the things that will keep us alive for the next few months.

Dolores, if someone just came in

and put $5,000 in your lap

and said, "I want you to spend this totally on yourself",

Dolores, nobody else," what would you do with it?

Well, I would...

I'd turn around and contribute it to the union.

That's what I would do.

No fair.

Because that would be spending it on myself,

because to me, this is my life's work.

To me, you know, this is the reason I live.

But don't you ever have the average woman's dream

of going out to some spa, and being relaxed,

and having a new hairdo, and buying a great dress,

and having a big party?

Well, to me, having a hairdo and being in a spa

would be a terrible waste of time.

My uncle, Cesar Chavez, and my mother

were both greatly influenced by the philosophies of Gandhi.

You can't help people unless you live like them.

So, we're not going to be able to help organize farmworkers

unless we live like the farmworkers.

My mother and Cesar ingrained themselves in the community

and they lived in those communities.

They didn't fly in from Washington or San Francisco

or L.A. to say, "We know it all and we're going"

to teach you guys how to build a union."

They said, "We need to build an association"

that addresses the day-to-day needs of folks.

I only knew growing up

that when we were poor, because we were,

my mom would always tell us, "You're poor by choice."

We have a tendency to want to be too comfortable, you know.

And I'm trying to educate my children

in the way that I'm raising them

to give their lives to work for other people.

And I'm hoping that out of the 11 that I've got,

I sure ought to come out with a pretty good percentage.

We didn't get it at the time,

the lessons that she was trying to teach us and, in fact,

we were like most teenagers,

rebellious and angry

about her ideas of materialism.

Our biggest dream was just to be like the kids at school

who had all the latest fashions,

but we didn't get any of that stuff.

So we knew we were outside of the norm for sure.

Why are you here today?

Because I don't like the people that are here in our town,

they don't belong here,

and I wish they'd all go back to where they came from.

Now, which people are these you're talking about?

I'm talking about the outsiders that have come into this strike

and have interfered with our daily workers.

Our workers are loyal workers and they work out in the fields

and yet they are harassed.

They're insulted.

We've had no trouble.

Well, now, are you unhappy at the labor troubles?

We had no labor troubles!

Senator Kennedy actively gave his backing

to the unionization campaign.

I think people are frustrated,

and I think they're terribly disturbed by the fact

that they haven't had more success,

and that the federal government in Washington

has not been helpful to them,

and that the state has not been helpful to them.

I remember my grandpa telling me how important it was

to the Latino community here in California

that Robert Kennedy came in and stood with them

when the sheriff and police department

were actually arresting these people for doing lawful things.

If I have reason to believe

that there's going to be a riot started

and somebody tells me that there's going to be trouble

if you don't stop them, then it's my duty to stop them.

Then you go out and arrest them?

Absolutely.

How can you go arrest somebody

if they haven't violated the law?

They're ready to violate the law.

In other words...

Could I suggest in the interim period of time,

in the luncheon period of time,

that the sheriff and the district attorney

read the Constitution of the United States?

To see this Harvard-educated guy

from Massachusetts talk in a funny accent,

stand with us, it meant something.

You can't imagine a political figure of that station

these days going after corporations with that vigor.

For who?

Not for his own.

Not even on his coast.

Wow, right?

We have somebody of national prominence

who knows who we are,

and who's running for president and has a chance to win.

We all went and worked on his campaign throughout the state.

The farmworkers pioneered

a voter outreach strategy to Latino voters

that had never been done before anywhere in the United States.

Labor's idea of mobilizing for an election

was to write a check to the local Democrat.

It was the farmworker folks in California

who were knocking on doors, persuading them to vote,

registering them at the door,

all the things Democrats nationally

are dependent on today.

There were hundreds of us.

Every door we knocked on, we knew we were going to win.

You could just taste victory.

We came back for the party and we had the TV set up

and, you know, I could see my mother on the television screen

next to Kennedy and him acknowledging the farmworkers.

For them and all of those Mexican-Americans

who were such supporters of mine.

And Dolores Huerta, who is an old friend of mine,

and who is working with the union,

to thank her and tell her how much I appreciate

her coming tonight.

We have certain obligations and responsibilities

to our fellow citizens, which we talked about

during the course of this campaign.

And I want to make it clear

that if I'm elected president of the United States,

with your help, I intend to keep them.

Now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.

Thank you very much.

I had never before experienced the death of the future.

The death of the past, yes,

but when the future dies, it's different.

All this hope,

the one person that would actually

stand up for us is gone.

Some people became very cynical after Robert Kennedy was killed,

but we had to continue to keep on working for justice

and nonviolence because

that's what Robert Kennedy would have wanted us to do.

Dolores was the closest one to Senator Kennedy,

and having been witness to something as terrifying as that

made her understanding of nonviolence even more important,

because she saw firsthand the impact that violence can have.

Hatred and racism are extensions of violence,

and if we become that which we are trying to end,

then you know, we are becoming like the oppressor then,

and we're trying to set up a different system.

To talk about grapes and lettuce

produced in poverty and suffering

felt like the first step.

An additional step was to talk about grapes and lettuce

produced in poisons.

And 90,000 people were poisoned last year.

A thousand people were killed last year.

And then people say, "Where at? In Vietnam?"

And I say, "No, in the fields of the United States of America."

The pesticides that were sprayed in those fields,

we never knew what it was

and there were so many times

we wound up stumbling out of the fields

because our eyes were watering, our skin was irritated.

You could just see the splotches on your skin.

It's toxic.

It's poisonous and people die.

Earlimart, McFarland, Delano, all those areas

have been affected by the use of pesticides since World War II

and they become cancer clusters,

little kids born with limbs that are misshapen.

They don't have them, you know?

This is the unspeakable stuff that the United Farm Workers

tried to fight against.

The farmworkers were a living daily reminder

and warning system

of what everyone was going to experience.

What appeal would you make to a consumer,

you know, a mother who's concerned about her children?

This is definitely a flag to them

to say there's something wrong

with the poisons that are on our food that they eat every day.

Well, we have the many cases, many affidavits of cases

where workers have been poisoned by pesticides,

where they have serious illnesses

and also there's, of course, many reports of deaths

that have been caused by pesticides.

But isn't that just sort of an occupational hazard?

Is there anything that can be done about it?

Well, we believe that something can be done about this

but, of course, in order to do this

we have to have the cooperation of the employers.

In the 19605, labor was seen as anti-environmental.

Well, here's the farmworkers in the vanguard.

They won.

They got DDT banned.

They founded the whole idea of environmental justice.

Older environmental groups

often were concerned with the redwoods,

they were concerned with the trees, not the people.

It was Dolores, among others, who made this linkage

by making people look at the human cost.

The environmental justice movement

said that certain environmental hazards

are disproportionately impacted on people of color.

That would never be allowed if these people

were white middle class.

So it wasn't simply stopping DDT,

but it was also making the larger point

you're only allowing this because of who the workers are

and their racial and class background.

The farmworker movement in many ways was a cultural revolution

because when people saw the farmworkers come out on strike

and go on those marches,

I think that it really said to people

if the farmworkers can do this, so can we.

It gave our Latino people a certain pride in who they were.

We are Indio, Mestigo, Hispano, Mexicano.

The names have all been changed across the centuries,

but they all mean the same thing.

We have been Americanos longer than America has existed.

We are Aztlén!

♪ Oye coma va ♪

♪ Mi ritmo ♪

♪ Bueno pa gozar' ♪

♪ Mulata' ♪

First time I opened up Time magazine,

a little picture of a march

and all the people out there looked like me.

That first impact was huge.

So, the farmworker movement was a catalyst

and ignited a personal and community-wide self-evaluation

of who we were as a people.

Yeah, I can remember seeing those marches,

and it was kind of amazing for a brown boy

to see a bunch of brown people in the United States

marching in simultaneity about something.

As a Latino kid, the pressure to assimilate was great.

Seeing women like Dolores Huerta out there

gave me an example as a young brown kid

to be able to engage in a way

that's not white, that was actually particular

to us as brown people in this country.

Even though I grew up

in such this strong Chicano movement,

the television and all of the media messages

told me everything the opposite,

that brown was ugly, being poor was bad.

She knew that we were going to be experiencing persecution

based on the color of our skin

and so she was constantly telling us

how beautiful our dark skin was.

In high school, I started talking about,

"I want a nose job for graduation.

That's what I want my graduation present to be,"

as if we could afford that, but that was my thing.

I wanted a nose job.

She was like, "Over my dead body"

"will you ever reconstruct that beautiful nose

"that God and your ancestors,

"your Tarahumara tribe has given you.

You will not touch that nose ever."

Revolution starts

with self-love in the sense

that if you're a member of an oppressed people,

an oppressed class, you have to develop self-respect,

and that starts by developing some affection for who you are.

You love your family and you say,

"Okay, but why does the world regard them as inferior?

"Why does the world regard them as ugly when, in my eyes,

they're quite beautiful?"

Movements not only affect laws,

they also affect the way people feel.

They affect emotions.

Well, then, is this more a social movement?

It's both. You can't separate it.

It's both a labor movement and a social movement

or you can say it another way.

I think all of the labor movement

has also been a social movement.

This might sound kind of corny,

but you have to really love people, you know,

to want to teach them,

to want to have them grow.

Because you're giving a lot of yourself when you're doing that.

It's not just filling out the form and filling out the paper.

When a farmworker comes in with this problem,

and then you're going to start telling him

the history of his abuse and start getting him angry,

that's going to take something out of you right there,

you know?

She was so dedicated to the work,

like a workaholic, that she felt guilty

taking time to enjoy life herself.

So going to a jazz concert, music, dance,

which was her passion,

she felt very guilty about doing those things

and she said that it was my dad, Richard,

who actually helped her

look at life a little bit differently.

Richard was very good to the kids in the family.

He had a very loving nature.

Of course, I wouldn't say Richard was a feminist,

but Richard was a great cook.

We consider you part of us, and us part of you.

You brought Dolores along to organize the union

and to be a business partner

and now she's living with your brother, so it's family.

Were you expecting that?

No, I certainly wasn't.

No.

Life is all an accident, you know?

Sometimes those things can't be foreseen.

When my mother and my father, Richard Chavez, got together,

my father was still married to another woman.

And, of course,

this is my version that I like to believe

to make myself feel better as a love child.

I've been called a bastard by some,

but I believe that my father was in an unhappy marriage.

At some point, my father couldn't be there anymore.

He met the love of his life.

I don't know what happened.

I wasn't there.

I was just conceived.

And of course, I didn't start learning this stuff

until we were older, but there was always kind of

a negative feeling against my mom.

What particularly about Dolores upsets people?

Well, it's her personal life,

all the children without marriage,

and just one every year or so is not accepted,

and I think most of us feel the same way.

She did put up with a lot of ridicule from people

who wanted to see her in a more traditional role,

by the men who were threatened by her power

and her assertiveness.

She cries, you know, she rolls down the tears,

you know, and I'm all for the Chicano

and all that and like it's a joke.

Like everybody knows that the UFW,

that's why they keep her in Sacramento,

and that's why they keep her in Washington,

keep them out of their hair,

because she just likes to talk a hell of a lot.

While you guys are trying to stop the money,

we have to keep a lot going.

How do you answer the criticism of detractors

who say that you have been married and divorced twice,

that you have 11 children sprinkled over two marriages,

and one relationship with Richard Chavez,

to whom you're not married?

I guess there's not much of an answer I can give to that.

You know, I could probably say, "Well, maybe I shouldn't

have had the children," but I don't believe that.

I think that a relationship should bear children.

Now, the thing is, who maintains these kids?

Who takes care of them?

Who supports them if she's out on these adventures?

We were told... Remember in the beginning,

one of the criticisms was that,

"You don't know what you're doing to your families.

"When they grow up, they're going to disown you

"and they'll really hate you because you're not giving them

the things that ordinary children would like to have."

Do you think the children ever resent you

because you're always so busy with the organization?

Oh definitely, they wouldn't be human if they didn't.

Of course, that lends for a lot of friction,

which, you know, we always have to work out.

The hardest thing for my children has been the absences.

LORI de LEON: She was always gone.

It wasn't a 9-to-5 job.

She was, you know, gone before we got up.

We'd have to get ourselves ready to go to school

and try to find something to eat.

A lot of my mom's absences had some positives and negatives.

I dropped out of high school and my mom didn't find out

until ten months later, you know, so.

We were spending the night in people's homes

that we didn't know.

We were going to labor camps and not knowing if somebody

was going to shoot at us, as they did many times.

It was very hard, I'll be honest with you.

Tough.

LORI de LEON: The movement became her most important child.

I realize the importance of the work,

but I was also very jealous of it.

So... there's scars there.

You know, there's scars there because of that.

When she was around, we were just like

soaking in as much as we could of her

because we just knew she was going to be gone again.

It was really difficult.

It was really difficult not to have my mom around,

especially when you would see your friends

and how involved their mothers were.

There's something about a mother's love, you know,

and attention.

So it was hard.

There were a lot of very difficult nights...

and months.

I lived with a woman in Bakersfield

for a few years while my mom went to New York,

but when my mom came back for me,

I didn't want to go with her

because I liked my new home.

There was stability.

I had meals every time I was supposed to have a meal.

I mean eventually, I did go back with her,

but I remember crying and feeling like,

"This was my new home," you know.

And then getting older and being like, "Why was I left there?"

Obviously, that has an impact on a child's psyche.

You know, but as I look back at it, I'm like I understand it.

I fully understand it.

You know, it's like I know there's brothers and sisters

that have the same experiences, but maybe they weren't so lucky

to be placed in a loving home.

You know, but that's part of the sacrifice...

That we made and that we had to make.

And we've all learned that we're not afraid to struggle,

we're not afraid to sacrifice,

because you can't make change if you're not willing

to give something up.

You've got to give up some comfort.

You've got to give up some time,

and then we can see the changes come.

Not every woman is going to take the kind of risks

that I took with my children,

you know, what they had to go through,

and I wouldn't really want to wish it on any child

or on any other woman.

What I did in terms of sacrificing my children,

I know it was very painful for them,

and it still pains me when I think about it.

And yet, I also feel very, very strongly

that she felt she was giving them so much more

than what she was asking them to sacrifice.

She was giving them meaningful lives,

which is something that is very, very rare in this society.

You've got to have some kind of faith,

you know, if you're going to be walking away from your kids

like that, you know, and leaving your families like that.

You've got to believe

in something bigger than you, you know?

Grape-picking may be a California problem,

but the United Farm Workers are determined

to let New Yorkers know about it.

♪ Bang bang ♪

♪ Bang bang ♪

♪ Bang bang ♪

In the strike, we were not able to succeed

because the growers refused to negotiate.

They could just bring in strike breakers continuously.

So we really had to think about what other options we had

and it was actually an attorney from San Francisco

and he said to us,

"Have you ever thought of trying to boycott?"

We had boycott committees

in Detroit, and Chicago, and New York City,

and San Francisco, and then in other cities

throughout the country, including Canada and Europe.

I was in charge of the New York boycott,

and I remember speaking at Madison Square Garden

and they told me I had 60 seconds to deliver my message

and my message was, "farmworkers are on strike.

"Don't buy grapes.

Don't shop at stores that have grapes."

That was it.

What first comes to mind is what Dolores modeled,

which was to go out and meet new people,

and make those connections about this struggle for justice.

The first support that we got was from

the African-American community, the Puerto Rican community.

We did not have to go into Harlem

to get them to take the grapes out.

They did it on their own.

The same thing in the Bronx

with the Puerto Rican brothers and sisters.

They said, "You want to get the grapes out?

We'll get them out," and they did.

But it was the farmworkers themselves that went out there

and told their stories,

getting people involved to volunteer

to get those stores to take the grapes out.

I am not ashamed because I am poor.

I am proud because I am a farmworker.

All of the farmworkers grew.

They learned to be public speakers.

Whereas they had been treated

as dirt in the outside society,

suddenly they were being given a podium to tell their story

and regain their own sense of worth in that process.

I didn't really know Dolores before New York,

but I think I was scared of her.

I don't think that Dolores thought I was worth the trouble

until I got Huntington Hartford to picket the A&P,

which of course got press

because the heir to the A&P fortune

was boycotting the A&P.

After that, we became partners.

My mother was raised a Catholic and very traditional,

and prior to going to New York City,

she really didn't speak of feminism.

I was in New York

when the feminist movement was being born,

but my mind was focused on getting all of those women

at those conventions to support the farmworkers.

There was a time when rarely could you discover

women of color who would identify as feminists

because it was assumed to be a question simply of gender

and if it was a question simply of gender,

that gender was white.

When social justice movements arise in a patriarchal system,

all kinds of false divisions are made,

and then there was the additional problem

in a lot of the Hispanic community of Catholicism,

which is especially oppressive to women.

I think that the feminist movement is extremely important.

I don't, of course, agree with the idea of abortion

because I do know from having 11 children that a fetus is live,

you know?

I think perhaps in the beginning,

she didn't quite see that those of us

who were supporting safe and legal abortion

are supporting the choice to have a child just as fiercely,

that we were advocating the right of a woman

to decide the fate of her own physical self.

That was difficult for me at the beginning,

but then it made me realize that a woman really cannot decide

what she wants to do with her life

unless she has the right to decide

how many children she wants to have.

It took us all a while

to get over our divisions,

but we came to realize that if we had the same adversaries,

we had a lot in common and needed to organize together.

I was out there fighting for the Mexican-American movement,

but I was not focused

on the rights of Mexican-American women.

I think that was the big shift that I had.

I hope you don't mind if I give a minute of that time

first to Dolores Huerta from the Farm Workers.

Down with grapes!

IAbajo!

Down with Gallo wine!

IAbajo!

Down with violence!

IAbajo!

Down with racism!

IAbajo!

Down with sexism!

IAbajo!

Si, se puede, si, se puede, everybody.

I know that she set me on fire in terms of racial injustice.

I would not have been able to see what's hidden

in the fields of our country without Dolores.

We've picketed all of the firms

that were carrying scab grapes today,

and we've gotten commitments from several of the people

out here that they won't handle scab grapes anymore.

There is no strike in the vineyards.

The Chavez group, representing at best a tiny minority,

are seeking to force, by what amounts to blackmail,

the growers to recognize their group as the bargaining agent.

I think that the growers could not envision

their serfs

standing up for themselves and demanding fair treatment.

And they just couldn't come to grips with that.

You had the most exploited workers in this country

rising up and pushing back

and pushing back in a very effective way,

building coalitions.

Cesar, Dolores, los demés, they looked like the people

that they were representing.

I think that scared the hell out of them.

If they should succeed with this illegal

and this immoral maneuver,

they then move through the agricultural community

of California.

The administration was buying even more grapes

to send, ironically, to the soldiers in Vietnam

by the thousands of pounds.

I mean it was total government interference.

So this was very clearly not only a battle

against the growers.

It was a battle against the government

and their support of the growers

who had helped to put them in office.

It was political from the beginning.

I'm against the grape boycott and I stand firmly against it.

I think Dolores and the leadership,

they knew what they were up against.

What the union did

is they made it a national issue,

and once the moral imperative became part of the issue,

then whatever power they have, you've got to crack it.

At the height of the boycott,

there were around 17 million people

who had stopped eating grapes,

and it was a pretty incredible feeling

to know that people were receptive to it.

That's what the grape boycott was.

It was a mass coalition of people that came together

and helped the poorest people in the land

bring the most powerful people in the state of California

to the negotiations table.

Why did you sign with the union?

Why did you negotiate the contract?

Well, it was the effects of the boycott.

There it is, the union stamp, the eagle,

the symbol of the United Farm Workers,

and now the symbol of victory.

After ten years of struggling, these now are union vineyards.

My mother had negotiated an agreement

with the Schenley Corporation a few years before,

but having reached an agreement with an entire industry

went beyond people's initial expectations.

The dream of a union was now reality.

For the first time, we began to understand that we were,

in fact, the architects of our own destiny.

The grape boycott, above all,

shows strategy does make a difference.

You can have a big heart, try your best, work 24/7.

If you don't have the right strategies and tactics,

you're not going to succeed.

Organizing, it does make a difference.

Under the new contracts, the wages increase each year.

There are paid vacations and other fringe benefits.

The most important is insurance and a good medical plan.

All of that was barely dreamed of a few years ago

by most of the pickers.

LORI de LEON: After my mother went to New York,

I think it solidified her beliefs in the power of women.

I mean, she knew it,

but it just took it to a whole different level.

And when she came back to the union,

she stood up more for herself

with the executive board, which were all men.

She wasn't so much asking for permission to do things,

she just did what she felt needed to be done.

And I think Cesar felt he lost a little bit of control of her.

She realized the knowledge and skillset

that she brought to this partnership

so it became more challenging.

The relationship between Cesar and my mother

was extremely complicated.

They were probably the best of friends

and they had the most passionate and heated arguments

that I've ever heard.

There's got to be a time where the two of you

don't agree on something.

What do you do?

Well, we would fight with each other.

We argue, but it's always on the issue

and then that's never been a personality thing.

LORI de LEON: They were each other's peers.

She felt she had every right to speak up and say her piece

and he didn't like that.

He would fire her and she'd say, "I quit," but she'd be there,

the first one in the office the next day,

and it would be business as usual.

She and Cesar were having a heated argument,

and Dolores walks out of the room and in Spanish she says:

Growing up, we saw so many people bowing down to him

and it was really hard to see that she was a person

who was just real with him,

you know, like nobody else would be.

My Tio Cesar was surrounded by a lot of yes men

and she was not the yes man.

She was the chief negotiator.

She was the cool head and hard as nails,

and people knew it,

and yet there was a group of men

that preferred to do things without her.

I saw a lot of resistance to her leadership,

putting obstacles or blocks,

and it clearly only was because she was a woman.

I even said to Cesar at one point in time, I said,

"Look, we have a lot of machismo here in the farmworkers movement

and I am not going to take it anymore."

One year when she came out in a national magazine,

she criticized her own union for being sexist.

And I remember, she called me up and she said,

"Oh, shit's going to hit the fan,"

because, you know, as soon as it gets out and Cesar...

She said everybody was pissed at her.

I thought that was incredibly brave of her to do that.

Through her example, she was able to get other women

to assume leadership roles within the union.

Before Dolores, it was all men

and that was the expectation that it was men's work.

The only reason that we've been able

to eliminate our enemies one by one...

Nixon, Reagan, the growers, the labor contractors-

the reason that we're going to win is because of the marches

and the strikes, the boycotts, and the sacrifices of time

and our families, you know, going to jail.

This is the reason that we've been able to survive.

We had contracts,

not only in California.

We had contracts in Arizona, New Mexico, and even parts of Texas.

LORI de LEON: Workers saw the benefits of the contracts-the wage increase,

the safety regulations where they couldn't spray pesticides

while the workers were in the fields,

but the contracts were only three-year contracts.

So in 1973, the growers signed a sweetheart contract

with the Teamsters Union.

Well, are the Teamsters Union easier for the farm growers

to deal with than you people?

Oh, much so, yes.

Yes, because they don't make any demands on the employers.

See, the Teamsters Union came into agriculture

to protect the growers from the United Farm Workers.

So under the so-called Teamster contracts,

the farmworkers don't really get any protections.

LORI de LEON: So at that time, workers went on strike.

At issue is the future

of the United Farm Workers Union.

The opposition force

is the biggest and richest union in the world.

The Teamsters have poured both money and muscle

into the fight to represent all California grape workers.

You're a lousy bunch of commie bums!

He's not afraid.

You stink! You smell!

LORI de LEON: They had all these injunctions against us.

So, there was a decision made to go ahead and violate them.

Sheriff's deputies have arrested the reported 1,700 farmworkers

on picket lines in four counties.

The arrests have given new impetus to the farmworkers

in this battle the Teamsters have called

a fight to the finish.

LORI de LEON: After that came all the violence.

My great-grandfather was in the Civil War on the Union side.

My father was in the military.

My brother was in the military.

And I remember when I first read

the Constitution of the United States in grammar school,

I always felt so proud of being an American.

I thought, "God, we have all these rights," you know.

In a democracy, you make your demands

and then somebody will listen to you.

Justice will prevail.

But I found out that when you do this

in an economic situation, it doesn't quite work like that.

Once we started making those kind of demands,

we had the same response that the black movement has had.

Our people were killed.

The system doesn't really want brown people or black people

to have an organization and to have any power.

I found out that no matter what I did,

I could never be an American.

Never.

Big business and agribusiness,

and racist police departments,

or corrupt police departments,

whoever it is that's taking part in that,

nobody's ever been convicted for any of the murders

of any of the martyrs of the United Farm Workers.

You know, think about that.

That animosity is visceral, and it's hate, and it's racial hate.

You know, it's basically the economics of racism.

They were willing to sign contracts with the Teamsters,

pay a lot of money as long as the workers

can be kept oppressed.

They will not accept workers as their equals.

You've been fighting so long.

Do you ever get so tired of fighting

you think you can't do it another day?

Well, I haven't felt that way.

You have to have commitment.

It's got to be a total commitment.

It's not something that you can just come in and leave.

You've got to stay there and keep working

in order to make a difference.

One has to understand that Dolores does not waste time

in negativity.

Yes, what could we have done better, et cetera,

but it's forward.

Do what has to be done and move forward and move forward.

California legislature passed a farm bill

it hopes will end violence in the fields there.

Under the new Agricultural Labor Relations law,

we'll be certified as a bargaining representative

and the employers have a duty to bargain with us.

Could you support Jimmy Carter?

At this point, no, unless he can really prove

that he is willing to keep the social contract with the people.

The reason that we've lost ground is political.

It's because of the Agricultural Labor Relations board.

Because of the appointments that were made,

the growers refused to bargain.

If we file charges, they're dismissed.

So there's no protections out there for workers.

Farmworkers still toil at the bottom of the economic ladder,

often exploited in ways that are still shocking.

Immigrants were discouraged from voting.

And so we have got to say to them,

"Look, it's okay for you to vote."

It's important and we want them to participate

in the political process.

Work on the bill resumes today

with debate centered on the controversial amendment

granting amnesty to illegal aliens.

Since we do have a special legalization program

for the farmworkers,

they will not be afraid then to make complaints

if they know that they won't get deported.

It's going to make a tremendous amount of difference.

Some four million illegal aliens are expected to seek amnesty.

We are ready to give those people permanent residency.

But the growers don't want them to be legalized

because once they're legalized,

they can protest against pesticide poisoning.

They can protest the low wages that they're being given.

George Bush spent the day in California

talking about the economy and the need for compassion.

Last night in San Francisco,

police moved in to break up a protest outside a fund raiser

for the vice president.

I must say, you have a peculiar breed

of demonstrators out there.

They're giving me grief there and his hair was flying around

and, "No drilling! No drilling!"

I finally said, "I don't want to do anything

that's going to hurt the environment."

"What about contras? What about contras?"

I'm glad to be inside.

My friends... Yes, I do mean friends...

We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life

for man on earth, with free markets, free speech,

free elections, and the exercise of free will

unhampered by the state.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged

in high moral principle,

for democracy belongs to us all.

No one is quite sure how things got out of hand

at the demonstration outside the hotel where George Bush

was speaking last night.

This police footage clearly shows.

UFW leader Dolores Huerta

trying to move as ordered by police.

A crowd control officer bashed her body with a police baton

and when we thought that we lost her,

it was really scary and really unexpected.

I was not ready to lose my mom before turning 20 years old.

Tonight, Dolores Huerta is recovering

from three broken ribs and emergency surgery

that removed her spleen.

Huerta's son Emilio

is grateful to the hospital she is alive.

Without their support,

she would not be alive today.

It was very hard to see this powerful, strong,

beautiful, like intimidating woman just be reduced,

you know, to just being bedridden, you know.

If you could use one adjective to describe Dolores,

it is dynamic.

So the hardest thing that could happen to her is to be immobile.

She was lying in bed and looking terrible, physically,

and I just felt terrible and said,

"Dolores, what can I do for you?"

And she just said, "Boycott Safeway."

The only good thing that I can think that came

out of that experience was that it was forced family time.

And so we all got to have as much of my mom

as we wanted around.

My kids were with me 24 hours.

They took turns, 24 hours.

I was sick for many, many months.

They never left me alone, not even one day.

And when you think about all the times that I left them alone

with different people taking care of them,

sometimes complete strangers,

and yet they were so kind to take care of me.

It was interesting, because all her children

got together to support her,

and that's when she realized

that family was really important to her.

There was a reconciliation on the part of the children too

with their mother.

That was sort of an awakening.

We felt that we needed to be less critical of my mother

and her lifestyle,

and we needed to support my mother more

in whatever role that she decided to take on.

LORI de LEON: After that incident in San Francisco,

you know, it took her a long time to recover and come back.

And her absence made Cesar more aware of her importance.

Her coming back and being there 100%

reestablished his commitment to her.

I remember when they were working together,

she came home and she said, "You know what Cesar told me today?"

"He thanked me for keeping him honest all these years.

Those were his words."

She goes, "I was taken aback by that."

That was so unusual of Cesar because within a few moments

that we were together,

we would usually be picking a fight with each other.

His whole behavior was so... not like Cesar.

As long as there's one ounce of strength in our bodies,

that ounce of strength will be used

to fight for this good cause.

And in the end, we will win.

Cesar Chavez was found dead yesterday in Arizona,

apparently of natural causes.

An estimated 25,000 people turned out Thursday

in Delano, California, for the funeral

of labor leader Cesar Chavez,

many of them farmworkers Chavez helped to organize.

I know she misses my Tio Cesar a lot.

He was a glue.

He was like a certain binding agent, you know?

Like you miss the sun on a cloudy day.

You know what I'm saying?

Who will fill his shoes or what process will you go through?

The executive board of the union will be meeting

and then they will decide who the next president

of the union will be.

That is the process that we have in our constitution.

Do you feel you could fill his shoes if you had to?

Well, I think I worked very many years with Cesar,

but I think it's up to the executive board

to decide who they want, you know.

It certainly was an expectation

on a number of people's part

that when Cesar died, Dolores would take it over

since she had been in there since the beginning.

You could imagine,

a farmworker's union run by a woman?

That would have been history.

But she was not chosen.

She called me to tell me after Cesar passed

that she was not going to succeed Cesar as president

and I, like, got so upset.

And then she said to me real calm, like super-calm,

but I could tell there was hurt in her voice,

she said, "Barbara, it would be one fight after another"

if I fought for this."

LORI de LEON: The workers wanted her.

The volunteers wanted her.

The membership wanted her,

but it was not about her,

it was about the union's survival.

And so, she advocated for someone else,

Arturo Rodriguez to become the president,

who remains the president of the union to this day.

After that, my mother started advocating

to go back to the original way of community organizing,

but she was receiving a lot of opposition from the leadership.

I think there were indications that her input

was not as welcome as one would have thought.

LORI de LEON: It was very hard to see that

after all that my mother had given,

all the years of her life,

putting the union above all else,

you know, including all her 11 children.

A lot of things changed and I just felt that

maybe it was really time for me to leave and I left.

I remember the convention

where she actually gave her resignation.

It was a very emotional experience

and I think very difficult for her.

La compafiera, Dolores Huerta.

LORI de LEON: I remember my sisters and I and my brother being on the stage

and surrounding my mother for support.

It was almost like when Cesar died, you know?

It was like a big part of the farmworker thing dying.

Everybody there was like... I don't know, in shock,

disbelief, you know.

G, Por qué, Dolores?

No te vayas.

No puedes.

Z, Qué vamos a hacer'?

I tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Dolores Huerta!

Dolores Huerta!

Dolores Huerta!

I can't imagine what she went through

resigning from the union.

There had to have been some grieving, but knowing Dolores,

there also had to have been some si, se puede moments also,

"I'm going to do something significant despite this."

Then she got a Puffin/Nation award,

which was $100,000 to do

whatever she wanted to do with it.

There were no strings attached at all.

She could have kept that money

to have a comfortable life for herself,

but Dolores has never been interested

in a comfortable life for herself.

After I'm feeling bad about having to leave the union,

I thought to myself,

I'm going to use that money

to start doing community organizing.

That is when Dolores announces that she is founding

the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

We're going to start out with Organizing 101.

She is really going to the grass roots,

into peoples' homes again, the house meetings,

seeing what people's issues are,

helping to give them the support

so that they become vocal

and training the people to become community organizers.

In the long term, I think it afforded her a sense of freedom,

freedom to touch every issue:

Feminism,

the environment,

the politics of our people, Latinos.

She made it all connect.

We're not going to stop until we get

more legalization.

[Si, se puede!

535. 35, se puede!

35, se puede!

- Viva la mujer! - Viva!

Viva la raza!

We can make the change,

but it's got to start with us.

And now in Tucson, Arizona, 800 students heard

labor activist Dolores Huerta say this:

Dolores would come to town regularly

to speak to our youth,

but the only thing that came from that was that phrase,

"Republicans hate Latinos."

The blowback was pretty intense.

Dolores Huerta telling our kids that Republicans hate Latinos.

I think that's hate speech.

The Texas State.

Board of Education rejected that you

be part of the social studies curriculum.

The reason people are opposed to Dolores Huerta,

she has been quoted as saying some other things

that are rather negative.

Horne says Huerta should not be allowed to address

any public school assemblies in Arizona.

He was testifying on behalf of a bill

which would outlaw ethnic studies in public schools.

Ethnic studies were brought to my attention

when a lady named Dolores Huerta gave a speech

at the Tucson High School.

She was a former girlfriend of Cesar Chavez.

If we go full circle to how politicians of the state

and then on Fox News would refer to her as Cesar's sidekick or,

in the case of Home, actually saying his girlfriend,

it was a perfect example why we need ethnic studies

because we have people in power at the policy level

that have no idea of the true heroes of this country.

I gotta tell you, I never heard of this woman before.

She's big in Arizona. I don't know her.

I mean we're knee-deep in sexism.

We're like downtown sexism city

when it comes to how powerful she is, you know,

and why she isn't studied,

and why people don't know her.

It is absolutely important to recognize the extent to which

Dolores was viewed as a subsidiary figure

and Cesar Chavez,

I have all the respect and reverence in the world for him,

but the assumption was he was the leader

and Dolores was the housekeeper of the movement.

If you look at the books that were written,

you never see Dolores Huerta referred to as cofounder.

She was there at the very beginning.

She was there as a woman representing

half of the working labor force in the fields.

I think it is absolutely essential

that people acknowledge

that it's male and female working together.

We try to impress upon her that it is important.

Latina girls do need to see statues of you

and they do need to have you in their history books.

Like we've really got to set the record straight.

I mean women cannot be written out of history.

It's about all the generations

of young Chicanas, young women of color,

who are currently involved in their own struggles

and need to be taught by example.

We're never going to change

if folks keep their place and stay quiet,

especially women, especially Latinas.

So, my mother, her story will be told

and it's our job to make that happen.

Her opinion is changing now

but it's a constant struggle for her.

We as women, we're so used to being accommodators.

We want to try to please people.

We have to learn to think about ourselves and what do they say?

As a woman, you're just thinking about yourself,

then you are what? Selfish, right?

If a woman is assertive, they use the B word, right?

I just always felt it was wrong for me

to try to take credit for the work that I did.

I don't think that way anymore.

We've got to be able to say our ideas

and then I'm going to quote Gloria Steinem on this,

"Put lights around it," right?

"Beat the drum.

"You know, put it in writing.

"Put your name on it to make sure

that you get the credit for the idea that you had."

85, se puede.

35, se puede!

For Cesar, "Si, se puede," wasn't just a slogan.

When people in Arizona said,

they told me, "No, Dolores, no se puede.

You can't do this in Arizona, only in California,"

my response to them was, "Si, se puede."

Si, se puede. 35, se puede.

Hers was the rallying cry that would later come to define

the presidential campaign of candidate Barack Obama.

Yes, we can!

Have you heard President Obama say, "Yes, we can"?

It came from Cesar Chavez, "[Si, se puede!"

Dolores Huerta came up with the slogan "Si, se puede"

and we all attribute that to Cesar Chavez,

even Barack Obama.

Of course, when he gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom,

he had to correct himself.

On a personal note, Dolores was very gracious

when I told her I had stolen her slogan, "Si, se puede."

Yes, we can."

Knowing her, I'm pleased that she let me off easy

because Dolores does not play.

All that a person has is his or her story:

Who they are, what they've gone through,

what their families have gone through.

This is their story.

And when you're trying to deny them their story,

you're taking away their power.

When you hear Dolores Huerta

talking about the erasure of indigenous,

black, and other memories in our histories,

it's really about that struggle for memory

and the memory that emancipates

or the memory that enslaves.

That's what we learned from our antepasados

and our ancestors and from Dolores:

You don't have to cower to power.

You have your own dignity.

It's beautiful to be Mexican.

It's beautiful to be Chicano.

A yes would insert Dolores Huerta.

The vote is six to nine.

The amendment fails.

Arizona governor Jan Brewer has signed the law

banning ethnic studies in Arizona public schools.

No matter what Tom Horne does

or what Jan Brewer does,

nothing that they can do can stop us

from telling our stories.

So her legacy to me is one of sustainability.

You can do this work and not burn out, right?

None of us have an excuse to tap out.

You were a young girl.

You must have had a dream.

Not the dream of being someone who liberated farmworkers.

There must have been something beyond that.

Could I have chosen,

I would probably have been a dancer.

I love dancing very much and music very much,

but I found out that I like people better

than I do dancing or music.

Despite the fact that Dolores didn't follow her passion

to become a dancer,

she is a dancer on the stage of justice.

♪ Suavemente, bésame A'

♪ Que yo quiero sentir tus labios A'

♪ Beséndome otra vez' ♪

♪ Suavemente, bésame A'

♪ Que yo quiero sentir tus labios A'

♪ Beséndome otra vez' ♪

♪ base, base ♪

♪ bésame un poquito' ♪

♪ base, base, base ♪

♪ Bésame otro ratito' ♪

♪ Cuando tu me besas' ♪

♪ Me siento en el airs ♪

♪ For eso cuando te veo ♪

♪ Comienzo a besarte' ♪

♪ Y si te despegas ♪

♪ Yo me despierto' ♪

♪ De ese rico suefio' ♪

♪ >J' Que me dan tus besos' ♪

♪ Suavemente' ♪

♪ Bésame, que yo quiero sentir tus labios A'

♪ Besando me otra vez' ♪

♪ Suavemente ese carol ♪

♪ Bésame Es la cosa A'

♪ que yo quiero sentir (us labios a'

♪ Besando me otra vez' ♪

♪ >J' Bésame suavecito I'

♪ Sin prise y can calma ♪

♪ Dame un beso bien profundo, que me Ilegue al alma' ♪

♪ Dame un beso mas, que en mi boca cabs ♪

♪ Dame un beso despacito, dame un beso suave A'

♪ Suavemente' ♪

♪ Until the philosophy which holds one race superior ♪

♪ And another ♪

♪ Inferior ♪

♪ Is finally ♪

♪ And permanently ♪

♪ Discredited ♪

♪ And abandoned ♪

♪ Everywhere is war ♪

♪ War ♪

♪ That until there's no longer ♪

♪ First class and second class citizens of any nation ♪

♪ That until the color of a man's skin ♪

♪ Is of no more significance than the color of his eyes ♪

♪ I got to say war. ♪

♪ That until the basic human rights ♪

♪ Are equally guaranteed to all ♪

♪ Without regard to race ♪

♪ We say war. ♪

♪ That until that day ♪

♪ The dream of lasting peace ♪

♪ World citizenship ♪

♪ And the rule of international morality ♪

♪ Will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued ♪

♪ But never attained ♪

♪ Well, everywhere is war ♪

♪ War. ♪

♪ War in the east ♪

♪ War in the west ♪

♪ War up north ♪

♪ War down south ♪

♪ There'll be war ♪

♪ And the rumors of war. ♪

♪ That until the ignoble and unhappy regimes ♪

♪ Which hold our sisters in Africa, yeah ♪

♪ Africa, yeah ♪

♪ Sub-human bondage ♪

♪ Has been toppled ♪

♪ Utterly destroyed ♪

♪ Everywhere is war ♪

♪ War. ♪

♪ That until that day ♪

♪ The African continent ♪

♪ Will not know peace ♪

♪ We Africans will fight ♪

♪ We find it necessary ♪

♪ And we know we shall win ♪

♪ 'Cause we are confident ♪

♪ In the victory ♪

♪ Of good over evil ♪

♪ Of good over evil ♪

♪ Of good over evil ♪

♪ Good over evil ♪

Si, se puede. Yes, we can.